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Anarchism in a nutshell

Anarchism is a social movement that seeks to abolish oppressive systems. Anarchists advocate a self-managed, classless, stateless society where everyone takes collective responsibility for the health and prosperity of their community.

Anarchists are against coercive hierarchy. Anarchists believe that power corrupts, and that everyone should be treated equally.

Anarchists seek to reduce or even end violence and oppression. The increasingly frequent misrepresentation of anarchism by the media to be about violence, nihilism, or disorder is completely false.

All anarchists are anti-capitalism and anti-state. Capitalism is the economic system where investors and landlords are allowed to extract wealth from the economy without contributing goods or services back. Under capitalism, actual workers have little autonomy, or control over themselves. Instead, they are controlled by politicians and bankers.

Anarchists advocate socialism instead of capitalism. Under socialism, workers have direct control of the means of production, or the land, factories, and offices. Through democratic organization, anarchists seek to remove the abusable systems of power that bosses and politicians leverage today to unjustly rule over society. Anarchists want to give everyone complete control over that which affects them.

Most anarchists are communists, and advocate a "classless, moneyless, stateless, society." Others are mutualists, and advocate "free market socialism". Anarchist society has no central authority, but instead consists of interconnected communities that use direct democracy (specifically, consensus) to organize themselves without rulers or bosses.

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This is a question I've been mulling over a while. In a hypothetical anarchist society (whether communist or mutualist), how would the quality of goods (food, vehicles, medicine, anything really) be assured, with the lack of government regulatory agencies enforcing things as food standards or lead content, etc.?

Would those producing the goods voluntarily bring in, say, an independent team to judge their goods, or do we simply trust that the goods are fit for consumption?

Transparency. Every stakeholder (which in practice turns out to be damned near everybody) should be able to have information about the products. When the whole shebang is an open book for everybody, including all of the experts, it will be much more difficult to misrepresent what is in food or physical things.

This would be my view. Worker-run companies aren't going to outsource their jobs to the places in the world with the least restrictions on how its down or to pollute the environments in which they and their families have to live. Neither are they going to produce goods for the local community which are substandard. None of it makes sense when there's no profit motive. Of course individuals may be lazy or careless, but the structural cause of shoddy production is gone, and there will be many more people who have an interest in ensuring the end product is good enough.

In a hypothetical society the people that form that society would still have to be anarchists, anarchists do not cut corners to increase production or to push products out to meet a deadline, it is not a capitalist system anymore. Those are the main reasons why products are of low quality, at least in the factories I've worked at.

In a hypothetical society the people that form that society would still have to be anarchists

I disagree. Anarchy is about structure, not ideology. I don't care if there are still people who want to oppress others; as long as no one actually can, you have an anarchist society.

anarchists do not cut corners to increase production or to push products out to meet a deadline

I don't like this either. I'm an anarchist and I've cut plenty of corners to meet deadlines. If you're talking about what we'd do in a hypothetical future society, I'd still just laugh off your claim as unfalsifiable and not rooted in any modern understanding of how people actually work.

As someone who's worked in factories (from complex machining for aerospace manufacturing to simple machining for furniture) I have noticed corners were cut for meeting deadlines most of the time, it was much more difficult to do for my bosses in the aerospace manufacturing but they still did cut corners when possible. What I noticed was that the workers were not cutting corners out of laziness, they were doing so because those were our orders. I cannot tell what the future would be like, there could always be irresponsible people that would cut corners but I also worked with professionals who loved machining and doing their jobs right, I think those folks would actually do better jobs under a different system

Unskilled labor is a whole different animal. I've seen workers handle food with their bare hands, sneeze into the same arm they use to carry food, throw things away because it's easier than cleaning them, package up damaged goods to re-sell, skip washing their hands after using the bathroom, and simply abdicate responsibilities so they can go home earlier. All of those in violation of either law or manager's direction or both. I've done several of these things myself.

I see, would you say some of those attitudes are because of a rush to go home or because it is some sort of lashing out against a job that could be viewed as oppressive?
I think some of those things would be fixable with some decent training and providing a healthy and pleasant work environment. Also, not having a capitalist system would help a lot with those issues, if a product is defective there is no pressure to repackage to resell because it is not exactly a for profits product.

It's mostly just trying to go home. Doubtless there are market conditions that make some of those things worse but part of it is just the nature of the fact that people can't do stressful, difficult, and unrewarding labor for very long before they start feeling like shit and want to get the hell out of there.

Really? You think getting the government, with the police, military, CIA, FBI, and the DHS, to back down after you've organized workers to take on all of the above and seize the means of production, risking their lives and all the social programs on which they depend, is going to be easier than getting together a group of people to test our food for rat shit? I'm gonna say I disagree with that one.

Consumer Councils have been proposed as a way for consumers to better regulate and decide what products they buy. They can exist in either a market or non market economy, though, they function a bit differently depending on the economy. The basic idea is that a bunch of people get together and say we want this kind of X (bread, car, carrots, computer etc) The producer is incentivized to produce products to their standards because it guarantees customers.